Background

What’s the data environment like at eBay?

Annette DeMarco (Director): eBay has one of the largest and richest data environments in the world. Across our many databases and Hadoop, we have millions of tables. We also have hundreds of analysts.

What are your current data initiatives and projects?

Annette: We’ve started a data governance initiative to document data spread all over eBay. We want to enable our analysts and business people to quickly understand the data they use and to ensure that they use the data appropriately.

We also want to continually increase the productivity of our analysts. We have hundreds of analysts at eBay and thousands of people who use data. The demand for insights about the business seems nearly limitless. We need to be able to answer more questions, build new insights, and do it all faster.

Finally, we want enable quick access to data. We have so much knowledge inside of eBay that’s already been produced, a lot of the time, the answer exists but people just can’t find it quickly enough.

eBay + Alation

The eBay team has seen Alation help

reduce the timeline of data governance and documentation initiatives from years down to months

reduce analyst on-boarding by 6 months or more in some cases

enable data users to find answers in tables and queries in minutes rather than hours or days

encourage and enable collaboration and knowledge sharing between analysts

How has Alation helped eBay continue to be data-driven?

Annette: Alation has helped eBay by centralizing access to the data and automatically organizing our knowledge of the data. It puts all of the information in one place, answering questions like what the data means, where it came from, how reliable it is, and who has used it.

Alation puts information that you need where you need it and when you need it. Our analysts now write ad hoc queries two times faster and are able to both find and share data and queries more efficiently for their jobs.